The Great Ex-Scape

by Jo Watson

  I looked around. I could distinctly hear the loud clinking of a wind chime, but coming from where? I turned my head again, and that’s when I caught sight of myself in the mirror.

  “NOOOOOOOO!” I screamed. “Nooooooo!” I put my hands on my head and felt them instantly. “What have I done?” I wailed, running my fingers over the tight cornrows in my hair. My hands trailed down, down, down and I felt something attached to the hanging ends. I lifted the ends and was utterly nauseated with what I saw . . .

  I wanted to cry. Hanging from the bottom of each braid was a luminous collection of plastic beads. Pink, yellow and green, just dangling there.

  “Whyyyyyy?” I wailed, looking at Alex, who was staring at me in total horror. “What have we done?” I asked, pointing at his hair.

  Alex scrambled to his knees and moved to the front of the car. He looked into the rear-view mirror and gasped. And then he turned to me.

  “What have we done?” he asked, looking pale. More pale than I’d ever seen him. Pale as a corpse without a drop of blood in it.

  I shook my head, tears welling in my eyes. “And why didn’t anyone stop us?”

  The previous night . . .

  “Oh my God, this place is soooooo beautiful,” I said walking into the salon. It was not beautiful, though. Let’s be clear about this. I was obviously seeing things through rosy-rainbow, weed-tinted glasses and had I been even vaguely in my right mind, I would have seen the signs immediately. The signs that I should have run and left. There were several signs . . .

  1. The interior of Salon Très Chic was painted pink. Not a trendy dusty-rose color with cute gold accents or anything like that. It was bright, hot pink! Candy, Barbie, bubble-gum pink.

  2. The heart-shaped mirrors were wrapped in bright purple LED lights, making it look more like a cheap disco than a place to get your hair done.

  3. At the hair stations, they had those old-school hair-dryer things. Those bulbous big ones. The ones that came out on arms and were placed over your whole head. They looked more like UFOs from a bad sci-fi film. And they were also a bright turquoise.

  4. The floors also were covered in fluffy zebra-skin-patterned carpets.

  I should have immediately looked at those four simple signs and run straight out the door. But we did not. We didn’t run, instead we told “Salome,” the owner of Salon Très Chic, also the only woman I’ve seen still rocking a perm, that we were there for makeovers. And what is worse than all that, was how we chose our makeovers.

  “What should we do?” Alex looked as excited as I felt. “I’ve never had a makeover before.” He was almost squealing now.

  And then I said it. The stupidest thing I’ve ever said before, but at the time, it seemed like the most brilliant idea on the planet. My mind was just swirling with “brilliant” ideas, and I felt like the love child of Elon Musk and Steve Jobs and was seriously wondering why no one had picked me out as the next creative genius who would revolutionize the world.

  “We should ask the magazine,” I said in a strange, deep and poignant voice. One that had a sense of gravitas to it. A smack of the mysterious.

  Alex gasped. “Yes! Let the magazine guide us.” (Who says that? No one who isn’t stoned, that’s for sure!)

  But we continued and what happened next would be the ill-fated thing that would land us in this braided, bleached mess.

  “Let’s open it randomly and whatever pictures we see, we get,” I said. Oh God, it had seemed like such a good idea at the time.

  At this stage, you would have thought Salome would have had the sense to stop us. You would have thought that even she could see that we were in no way sane enough to be making any kind of aesthetic choices. But she didn’t. In fact, she seemed only too excited to be a part of this insanity.

  We flipped the magazine open and . . .

  Bands We Loved In The Nineties.

  I wish the voice had screamed at me again. I might have listened. I wish it had told me that Beyoncé’s Destiny’s Child braids would not be a good look on me, no matter how much I liked Beyoncé and had belted out “Say My Name,” in my bedroom with a hairbrush with the door closed. And I really wish the voice had spoken up when Alex and I had pointed at Justin Timberlake’s over-bleached mop of NSYNC hair and I wish I hadn’t egged him on when I shouted, “Oh my God, I had such a crush on Justin when I was younger.”

  Why had no one stopped us . . . why? I ask with tears in my bloodshot eyes.

  CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

  Present day . . .

  We both sat in the front seats holding our heads in our hands. We’d driven up the road and found a legitimate parking spot for the car. Neither one of us could remember why we’d been looking for a campsite the night before.

  “It’s not that bad,” Alex said, breaking the long silence that we’d been sitting in.

  “Are you kidding?” I wailed. “It is that bad. In fact, it’s worse than that bad! That bad would be if I’d cut bangs which everyone knows would not look good with my face shape, that would have been bad. This, however, is so much worse than bad.”

  Alex turned and looked at me. I stared at his head. It was hard not to stare. It was almost all you could see. It was so bright and reflective that it almost changed the lighting inside the car. The bleach job was a very bad one to begin with. It was white in some parts, fading into a yellowish color, radiating outwards to bright orange. All these colors, coupled with his gorgeous gray eyes, slightly olive complexion and chiseled face that was now sporting some very sexy stubble just looked so damn . . . wrong. He looked like a rubbery Malibu Ken doll!

  “Oh my God, I can’t take you seriously with that hair!” I slapped my hands over my eyes, which caused my braids to clank together and the car was filled with the sounds of wind chimes once more. I cringed and then wanted to cry.

  “My hair makes a noise,” I whimpered weakly.

  “My hair blinds people,” Alex offered with a resigned sigh.

  I kicked something with my foot and looked down at the floor, and there it lay. The thing that had caused all the trouble. I picked it up and it fell open on the page. There were fresh scribbles and notes all over the page.

  “Uh . . . Alex?” I asked nervously. “Why have we got lots of multiple ticks next to number two again? Commit murder on social media as if we did something else last night? Oh God, did we post pictures of ourselves?”

  Alex and I stared at each other and then both jumped at the same time.

  “Oh my God!” I scrambled into the back of the car looking for my phone. Alex did the same, finding his phone under a seat.

  “We didn’t, we didn’t, we didn’t . . .” I pleaded with myself out loud as I opened Instagram. But I had a bad feeling about this. Very bad.

  “We did!” Alex held the phone up for me to see.

  “Oh God,” I gasped as I looked at the picture of the two of us and started shaking my head. “How bad does it get?” I was terrified to know the answer. Alex looked back down at his phone and started flipping through the pictures.

  “A lot worse,” he admitted, holding the phone up for me to see.

  This time I didn’t gasp. A gasp was not adequate for this moment. A gasp would not have sufficed, even though I was fully aghast and it was a very gaspy moment.

  “How many did you post?” I asked, my voice quivering.

  Alex started counting and he only stopped when he got to six.

  I looked down at my own Instagram and simply shook my head in utter disbelief. I’d posted about ten selfies of the three of us in various places around town. And when I say three, I mean Alex, myself and “Sally,” which is clearly what we’d decided to name the sex doll who was in every picture with us. It wasn’t bad enough that we had actually documented our very ill-conceived makeovers and posted them on social media, but to have done it with a sex doll . . .

  “We changed our Facebook profile pictures too,” Alex said.

  I bit my lip and opened my Facebook App, terrified of wha
t I was about to see. And when I saw it an awkward silence filled the car.

  I finally spoke once I’d taken it in. “Well, it can’t get much worse than that.” I pointed at the picture of me kissing Sally on the cheek, her big, gaping mouth staring into camera.

  “Hey, you sent me a video on WhatsApp,” Alex suddenly said. “Let’s see what it is.” He moved to sit next to me and then pressed play.

  “Okay!” I said, slapping my hands over my mouth as I looked at it.

  “Wow!” Alex said.

  “We are really going for it, aren’t we?” I stared at the video in shock. Alex and I were kissing. But not just kissing, I mean, really, really kissing. Tongues, open mouths, hands . . . We both watched in total silence and jaw-dropping shock, until the video cut out.

  There was silence in the car after that.

  “Well, that was—” I started but didn’t know what else to say.

  “Interesting,” Alex offered up.

  “That’s definitely one way of looking at it,” I said.

  We sat in silence again. And then both of our phones beeped with a message at the exact same time.

  CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

  Five words.

  That was all. That was all we needed to be back on the road once more and heading straight back to where we had come from.

  Julian: My wife is a hairdresser.

  We drove in total silence back to the tropical beaches of Saint-Gilles where this whole adventure had started. The mood in the car was strange. We cast awkward smiles at each other and tried to make small talk the entire time, but nothing was really clicking.

  Two words.

  The video.

  Images from that video were running through my mind over and over again, and whenever I looked at Alex, all I could see was his mouth. Lips. Tongue. Soft hands. Face. And I wanted them. I wanted them all, and not necessarily in that order and that thought made me feel very unsettled and somewhat confused.

  We finally arrived at the address that Julian had sent us. Immediately, I could see that this was a much more civilized place. A row of pretty shops were set along a strip by the marina and hers was the third one. Its front was painted in a bright turquoise with gold lettering written above the door . . .

  Halo.

  Now that, that was a much better name for a hair salon. We walked inside and were greeted immediately by a bubbly redhead. She introduced herself as Emma, Julian’s wife. She had even cleared her schedule to help us, since this was such an “ ‘emergency,” and we were Julian’s friends.

  My hair was not that hard to undo. The plaits that Salome had put in weren’t very good and some had already started coming loose. But once all the plaits were out, I had something that resembled a poodle. Emma gave me a quick wash and blow and soon my hair was back to normal. No one would ever know that I had once rocked braids and beads . . . except all those people who’d seen my social media over the last twenty-four hours, which was a lot. I’d also received some fairly interesting messages from my friends, mainly wondering if I was okay, had I lost my mind, why was I playing with a sex doll and why did I look like Destiny’s Child? The usual thing you would expect from caring friends. Except for that one message where Stormy-Rain actually thought I looked amazing.

  Emma started on Alex. She said it would take a little longer, so I excused myself and went for a walk along the marina. It really was quite beautiful here. A row of palm trees ran the length of the water’s edge. Small boats bobbed up and down in the crystal-clear waters, swaying to the invisible current. The air was warm and smelt fresh and salty.

  I continued my walk; all the way up, and then back all the way down. A pharmacy caught my eye, and I quickly went inside. I can’t resist a pharmacy, they always have interesting things, besides, I needed some more deodorant. I walked the aisles and found the deodorant, then something caught my eye and I moved over to them. Various boxes and packets of wax.

  “Mmmm.” I bent down and took a closer look. I might need one of those. So I grabbed one. With all my stuff safely in a bag, I headed back out, just in time to see a dark-haired Alex walk out of the salon and into the sun.

  I stopped and watched him. His hair wasn’t the same as before. That gorgeous salt and pepper hair was gone, now it was a dark, rich, warm, brown. But he looked amazing. God, he was really hot, wasn’t he? I mean, I knew he was hot, but all of a sudden, he looked even hotter. Hotness level . . . killing it. Hot AF. So damn . . . and he was nice. More than nice. Kind, funny, interesting and he’d kissed me like that and told me I was beautiful. Now why couldn’t I have met a man like him instead of one like Matt? My finger itched and I scratched it, something caught on my nail and I looked down. The ribbon was starting to fray around the edges and a long green thread had come loose. I tried to snap it but it didn’t work and now I had a long thread dangling from my hand. I sighed and looked back up just in time to see Alex run his hands through his hair. The muscles in his arm and shoulder rippled through his clothing. Then he pulled his phone out of his pocket, almost in slow motion. He flipped his hair again and then raised his phone to his face. His big, strong, smooth hands holding the phone tightly. His fingers moved deftly over the phone screen. Nimble perfect fingers, surgeon’s fingers. I watched him, totally intoxicated by everything he was doing right now. And then suddenly . . .

  “AAAHH!” I screamed, jumped and dropped my packet on the floor when my cell phone rang in my bag. It was so loud and had caught me so off guard that I’d almost fallen over in fright. The shout had caused Alex to look in my direction. He smiled over at me and waved his phone in the air, indicating that he’d been the one calling me.

  I scrambled to pick my shopping up off the floor as Alex came running over.

  “Let me.” He bent down and grabbed my things, slipping them back into the bag.

  “Thanks.” So nice. “Your hair looks good.” I indicated.

  He smiled. “Much better.”

  “Much.” I smiled back at him.

  “I managed to get us back into the same hotel we were staying at, by the way. I hope you don’t mind?” he asked politely.

  “Oh. Thanks,” I said.

  “So we should go and book back in.”

  “So much for our big road trip,” I said, shrugging and starting to walk back towards the car.

  “What do you mean?” he asked.

  “Well, it’s not exactly like we adventured very far and long. And we don’t really even remember a whole chunk of it either. Other than some very embarrassing bits.”

  “At least we have all the photos and the videos to fill in the blanks,” he said. His voice had an edge to it. Teasing, yet . . . something else.

  His voice made me stop walking. “At least,” I whispered back to him, feeling my blood heat.

  “So let’s go home.” Alex draped his arm around my shoulders then stopped.

  “What happened?” He raised my hand to his face and looked at it.

  “The ribbon seems to be unraveling,” I said.

  He looked at the ribbon intently and then raised it to his mouth. “You mind?” he asked.

  I shook my head. Alex gripped my hand tightly, raised his teeth to the string and tried to bite it off. It didn’t work, though and only made it unravel more. Alex started pulling the loose thread, and with every pull, the ring became thinner and thinner and thinner, until the thread finally snapped. We both looked down at the ribbon on my finger.

  “Mmmmm,” Alex mumbled.

  “What?” I looked up at him, he was still staring down at my hand.

  He shrugged. “It’s almost gone,” he said quietly, thoughtfully.

  “It is,” I echoed.

  He raised his other hand and put it next to mine. His ribbon was still very much intact.

  “Yours is fine,” I said. It was almost a question, although I wasn’t sure what the answer to that would be, or what I was really asking with my question.

  “Good,” he said, pulling his hand away from mine.<
br />
  Something stabbed me in the stomach. A painful, uncomfortable feeling. “Good,” I echoed. “Maybe I should tie a new one around me?” I asked.

  He looked up at me momentarily, our eyes locked for a second and then he looked away. “I’m sure we can find another one in the hotel,” he offered.

  “Sure,” I said, feeling somewhat sad, I didn’t quite know why.

  We started walking back to the car in total silence and then headed for our hotel.

  CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

  After checking in, we headed back to the bar. Julian was there to greet us with two pink cocktails. We slid into our usual seats and sat down.

  “You guys look much better,” Julian said, sliding the drinks over to us.

  “Your wife is amazing,” I said, taking a much needed sip.

  “She is. But you don’t have to tell me that,” he said sweetly. “You know, I met her right here. She sat exactly where you guys are sitting now.” He then looked at us strangely. “Who knows, maybe this is a lucky spot to fall in love.” He met my eyes and seemed to be trying to convey something to me. Then he looked at Alex, giving him the same kind of look.

  “Are you okay?” I asked him.

  “Are you guys okay?” he asked back.

  “We’re good,” I said. I tried to sound casual and chilled but somehow it hadn’t come out exactly in the way I planned for it to. It sounded more panicky and on edge, which was how I felt. I just wasn’t too sure why, though.

  “Really? Anything happen that I should know about?” He looked from Alex to me and then back again.

  Alex seemed to stiffen up in his seat a little, then shuffled from side to side a few times. “No. All good,” he said, sipping his drink.

  “If you guys say so,” Julian teased.

  I scrunched my face up at him. What was he getting at here?